Freelancer Tag

[UnknownObject]

Is there any other way of knocking down your Zoner rep aside from knocking off Zoner Guards or Zoners or killing NPCs in general? What about hitting Zoner storage dumps? Does that have any effect on rep at all? Haven't tried it myself, but I was wondering if it did.

Storage dumps do affect your rep and drastically. However in this case it doesn't help. Just like killing Zoners this affects your rep with them directly, which triggers an indirect response in your Freelancer rep.
So if you kill 30 Zoners then bribe them back then your freelancer rep is exactly where it started.
Basically you have to adjust your rep with zoners indirectly which means beating up on their friends or helping their enemies.

UnknownObject, a question about your method - in hitting up both Zoners and Bounty Hunters with bribes, and BH in particular, what did your rep with everyone else end up looking like?

My method is largely based on Zoners. Others suggested BHs. The bizarre sequence of double bribing the regular Zoners while killing the guards means in effect you are taking the Zoner bribe about 8 times. (As killing the guard means nothing to all other factions including Freelancers.) This is enough to get anyone who likes the Zoners to like you. Luckily the Zoners don't have many enemies, the most obvious one is BH. Luckily you can take a single BH bribe (which in itself also helps your freelancer rep) to correct this.

Easy enough to drop your rep with House police and militaries, but what I'm getting at here is I imagine you weren't very well liked by the various criminal elements of society. Being a freelancer, one would like to have one's options open and having a bad rep with Hackers, Outcasts, Corsairs limits things. Easy enough to go and bribe all of them, I suppose, but there's a bit of tinkering involved there as well.

Like I said it is a neutral tactic to all house police, military and criminal factions as they have no empathy either way with the Zoners.

Now, I'm not bashing you method here, but it is kind of OOC. I'm wondering if there's a more IC way of going about it - just using bribes and misson aborts. I suppose it can work, just takes more time.

It is OOC and I admit it... but then setting up characters can be if you want certain tags.
To do it all IC I think your best bet is to really beat up on LWB or GMG. This drops your Zoner rep indirectly which is what you need. However if you do this other factions will push themselves to the bottom of your status list.
(Aside - No mission aborts work at all in getting the Freelancer tag.)
You can improve your freelancer rep by running hundreds of BH missions and this is how I used to do it but then your rep with the people you've been killing gets messed up and also other factions become green, so you have the problem of getting Freelancers back to the top.